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On This Day 25 Years Ago, the Web Became Public Domain (popularmechanics.com)
On April 30, 1993, CERN -- the European Organization for Nuclear Research -- announced that it was putting a piece of software developed by one of its researchers, Tim Berners-Lee, into the public domain. That software was a "global computer networked information system" called the World Wide Web, and CERN's decision meant that anyone, anywhere, could run a website and do anything with it. From a report: While the proto-internet dates back to the 1960s, the World Wide Web as we know it had been invented four year earlier in 1989 by CERN employee Tim Berners-Lee. The internet at that point was growing in popularity among academic circles but still had limited mainstream utility. Scientists Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf had developed Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), which allowed for easier transfer of information. But there was the fundamental problem of how to organize all that information.
In the late 80s, Berners-Lee suggested a web-like system of mangement, tied together by a series of what he called hyperlinks. In a proposal, Berners-Lee asked CERN management to "imagine, then, the references in this document all being associated with the network address of the thing to which they referred, so that while reading this document you could skip to them with a click of the mouse."
Four years later, the project was still growing. In January 1993, the first major web browser, known as MOSAIC, was released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. While there was a free version of MOSAIC, for-profit software companies purchased nonexclusive licenses to sell and support it. Licensing MOSAIC at the time cost $100,000 plus $5 each for any number of copies.
In the late 80s, Berners-Lee suggested a web-like system of mangement, tied together by a series of what he called hyperlinks. In a proposal, Berners-Lee asked CERN management to "imagine, then, the references in this document all being associated with the network address of the thing to which they referred, so that while reading this document you could skip to them with a click of the mouse."
Four years later, the project was still growing. In January 1993, the first major web browser, known as MOSAIC, was released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. While there was a free version of MOSAIC, for-profit software companies purchased nonexclusive licenses to sell and support it. Licensing MOSAIC at the time cost $100,000 plus $5 each for any number of copies.
We licensed it to test our new web site that I don't think any customers even used until a couple of years later. The site was pretty crappy since I learned HTML from viewing the source on other sites, and it took me a lot of time so that was a huge waste of money.
I was working at Indiana University at the time. In the fall of 1993 I found the world wide web. I got xmosaic working on my unix desktop and also installed NCSA httpd. I downloaded the HTML specification and got to work implementing web pages. At the time, I had pages that took 30 seconds to generate.
Our department (basically IT for the university) was smack dab in the middle of moving our information services from the VAX/VMS cluster to the newfangled gopher service.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Along with a few other folks I did a "stop the presses" and convinced them to abandon that project and go straight to the WWW. It took a lot of convincing since they were so invested in getting gopher up and running. Plus, the text-only information was a pretty easy direct-map to gopher.
The browsers were really primitive at the time. No stylesheets, but we had inline images and could set background colors.
Not only that, the development was mainly done on the X11 platform. The Windows and Mac browsers were always lagging in features.
Fill-out forms were a new thing, and the sub ordering application was the standard demonstration for that. Before fill-out forms, there was the "isindex" tag which would show a search box, the contents of which would be added as the "query" part of the url when you hit enter.
There were no cookies and thus no real way to keep state. When I quit the university, we were working on a way to store session information in files on the back end. The idea was basically what PHP was doing back around 1999 - give the user an MD5 hash or something that was used as the query portion of the url. Every url had to go through CGI, and the script would look up the file containing the session information and read it in, and possibly write it out. We wanted to move some of the administrative actions - such as students setting up accounts - to the web. Since fill-out forms weren't really available on the Mac and Windows platforms, we were looking at using "isindex" to get all information to the backend.
It's amazing how far we've come in 25 years. I started doing heavy web development in 1999 and even then it was amazing how far it had advanced.
Do you have ESP?
By 1994, Mosaic would build pretty easily on a Slackware distribution. I had that, NCSA httpd and a few other goodies installed on a Dell PC that Boeing was good enough to drop on my desk a few months before the Windows install crew could get around with their box-o-floppies. By the time they did stop by, I just told them "Never mind."
Engineering was responsible for providing documents to the factory floor. Which was done with a convoluted combination of an index database (accessible via 3270 terminals), some notes scribbled on a piece of paper and then a manual search for a file on some server share. Along with all the possible fat-finger errors imaginable. So one day I was goofing around with httpd and managed to get a read-only link to the mainframe to select datasets applicable to a particular plane. And then format a link to the document server. Two clicks and you're done. I showed it to my boss who showed it to some factory managers. Boss came back from meeting and said, "The shop wants this web thingy in production in two weeks." So we got an actual server (Sun), built the pieces and made the schedule. Factory loved it. Boeing computer services* hated it. They figured that this kind of development could have earned them a few tens of millions of dollars and a fully staffed program for a year or two.
*One of their IT guys asked me how I (the sole maintainer of the entire web system) managed to build the HTML index pages from a database dump to keep the web data up to date. They didn't understand dynamic pages back then.
Have gnu, will travel.